Honorverse Top Ten Tacticians, Strategists

kenl511 wrote:My point is that Churchill was taking on two jobs where he should have just done one. Britain needed his skills in rallying the people for the conflict. He had literally hundreds of better choices for the other post and not exhausted himself with two killing jobs.

Quite so. Though it should be mentioned that the post of "Minister of Defence" was specifically created by Churchill when he became prime minister, due to previous lack of a political head of the military so the position isn´t a normaly ministry as such.

Also to be noted is that both Attlee in 1945 and again Churchill in 1951, upon becoming prime ministers, held the "Minister of Defence" for about 18 and 6 months respectively.

I came to this thread late but I have a few quibbles with previous posters:-

First the guy who said Bedford Forrest's "Get there first with the most men" was out of date misses the point entirely. In Forrest's day, generally "most men" equated to strongest force which is what he is really saying.
Get there first with most force is still the basic operation tatic, strategy, grand strategy of any conflict, war, campaign, battle or skirmish.

Native talent is no substitute for experience, no matter who you are,

Umm.Really. I am sure the highly experienced and SUCCESSFUL Austrian generals in Italy up against a new upstart young French general named Napoleon would have agreed with you. Their replacements probably would have too. The generals who replaced them would have been too busy trying to keep Napoleon out of Vienna to comment.

I won't say the odds weren't heavily stacked in the North's favor, because they were. I strongly suspect, however, that the inevitability of the North's victory because of its industrial and manpower advantages has been substantially overstated and that to a very large extent this is, indeed, the product of historical hindsight.

This whole post was quite excellent.
It did not cover the key points clearly. The key points are the victory conditions. What was the North's victory conditions and what were the Souths?

Most people have a very poor understanding of 'victory conditions' as a concept from what I have seen over the wargames table/map/game board/computer screen and from the study of military history I have made over the the last 50 odd years.
Scheer at Jutland for instance. Tactical brilliance, stategic failure.

Any rationale mind looking at the overall sit rep in May, 1941 would have said the British were going down for good.

Um, did you mean 1940? By May 1941 the Germans had missed the bus, badly.

Churchill was more of a "oops i did it again" fumbler.

Churchill gets a bad rap. Considering he was in charge of one of the winners in WW2 this seems harsh. Much of goes back to WW1 and Gallipoli. A valid strategic idea spoilt by the incompetent British generals on the spot.
AS an Aussie ANZAC is close to the chest but Churchill was not to blame. The idiots commanding the invasion were. I am not saying it would have done what Churchill hoped but it had promise of knocking Turkey out of the war quickly. Huge gain for little loss. The casualties at Gallipoli were pretty tame compared to say the Somme or Verdun or Paschendale etc.

octavian30 wrote:I came to this thread late but I have a few quibbles with previous posters:-

First the guy who said Bedford Forrest's "Get there first with the most men" was out of date misses the point entirely. In Forrest's day, generally "most men" equated to strongest force which is what he is really saying.
Get there first with most force is still the basic operation tatic, strategy, grand strategy of any conflict, war, campaign, battle or skirmish.

Native talent is no substitute for experience, no matter who you are,

Umm.Really. I am sure the highly experienced and SUCCESSFUL Austrian generals in Italy up against a new upstart young French general named Napoleon would have agreed with you. Their replacements probably would have too. The generals who replaced them would have been too busy trying to keep Napoleon out of Vienna to comment.

I won't say the odds weren't heavily stacked in the North's favor, because they were. I strongly suspect, however, that the inevitability of the North's victory because of its industrial and manpower advantages has been substantially overstated and that to a very large extent this is, indeed, the product of historical hindsight.

This whole post was quite excellent.
It did not cover the key points clearly. The key points are the victory conditions. What was the North's victory conditions and what were the Souths?

Most people have a very poor understanding of 'victory conditions' as a concept from what I have seen over the wargames table/map/game board/computer screen and from the study of military history I have made over the the last 50 odd years.
Scheer at Jutland for instance. Tactical brilliance, stategic failure.

Any rationale mind looking at the overall sit rep in May, 1941 would have said the British were going down for good.

Um, did you mean 1940? By May 1941 the Germans had missed the bus, badly.

Churchill was more of a "oops i did it again" fumbler.

Churchill gets a bad rap. Considering he was in charge of one of the winners in WW2 this seems harsh. Much of goes back to WW1 and Gallipoli. A valid strategic idea spoilt by the incompetent British generals on the spot.
AS an Aussie ANZAC is close to the chest but Churchill was not to blame. The idiots commanding the invasion were. I am not saying it would have done what Churchill hoped but it had promise of knocking Turkey out of the war quickly. Huge gain for little loss. The casualties at Gallipoli were pretty tame compared to say the Somme or Verdun or Paschendale etc.

+
No, I meant 1941. March, April 1941 saw German Victories everywhere they faced the British. The only victories the British had at the time were Palmyra and Ethiopia. In both cases they relied heavily on soldiers from the Empire (Arab Legion in Palmyra and the Indian British Army in Ethiopia).

Churchill put himself in the Military chain of command unnecessarily and interfered with Theater Commands frequently negatively. In November, 1940, he allowed the firing of Dowding and transferred Parks to Training by the RAF staff. The only successful command team he had.

My favorite quote regarding WSC during WWII comes from the official Royal Navy history, "There was not one single Flag officer Churchill did not either fire or threaten to fire,"

octavian30 wrote:Churchill gets a bad rap. Considering he was in charge of one of the winners in WW2 this seems harsh. Much of goes back to WW1 and Gallipoli.

You need to look at just how much foolishness he did during WWII. For one thing, his focus on the Mediterranean caused no end of issues for most of the war. The Greek campaign, the Italian campaign, the massive fuckup that was the Norwegian campaign?

Churchill can be blamed for a lot because of how he interfered where he shouldn´t have.

octavian30 wrote:

I won't say the odds weren't heavily stacked in the North's favor, because they were. I strongly suspect, however, that the inevitability of the North's victory because of its industrial and manpower advantages has been substantially overstated and that to a very large extent this is, indeed, the product of historical hindsight.

This whole post was quite excellent.
It did not cover the key points clearly. The key points are the victory conditions. What was the North's victory conditions and what were the Souths?

Most people have a very poor understanding of 'victory conditions' as a concept from what I have seen over the wargames table/map/game board/computer screen and from the study of military history I have made over the the last 50 odd years.
Scheer at Jutland for instance. Tactical brilliance, stategic failure.

The South's victory condition was to inflict enough damage on the Union that the North decided conquering the South wasn't worth the price they would pay.

Helen Zilwiki, Sr.

(Not least because of who led the opposition.)

dreamrider

octavian30 wrote:Most people have a very poor understanding of 'victory conditions' as a concept from what I have seen over the wargames table/map/game board/computer screen and from the study of military history I have made over the the last 50 odd years.
Scheer at Jutland for instance. Tactical brilliance, stategic failure.

Would probably agree with you on the poor understanding of "victory conditions" beyond very basic stuff, but Scheer at Jutland wasn't tactical brilliance at all -- the man got his "T" capped TWICE, and what saved him was lousy British shell quality and faulty British intelligence handling.

dreamrider wrote:Helen Zilwiki, Sr.

(Not least because of who led the opposition.)

dreamrider

If you mean Theisman, IIRC correctly he was, at best, the flag Captain to Commodore Reichmann that he didn't have much use for (at least as a tactician).

As for Helen Sr., she was as bold and fearless as the daughter who bears her name, but we really don't see much of her as a tactician--given her circumstances, she did what she had to do to preserve the freighters under he charge while doing maximum damage to the enemy at the cost of her command...which one would expect from many of the Mantie offiers trained in the tradition of Edward Saganami.

octavian30 wrote:This whole post was quite excellent.
It did not cover the key points clearly. The key points are the victory conditions. What was the North's victory conditions and what were the Souths?

Most people have a very poor understanding of 'victory conditions' as a concept from what I have seen over the wargames table/map/game board/computer screen and from the study of military history I have made over the the last 50 odd years.
Scheer at Jutland for instance. Tactical brilliance, stategic failure.

I'd quibble. Scheer's first battle turn to break away from the trap was very well done. His second inexplicable turn back into the Grand Fleet was, well, inexplicably. He'd extract his forces, without any significant damage, from a trap by an overwhelming enemy. And then he turns back into it; just to have to potentially sacrifice his destroyers to get himself right back out?

Strategically though, attempting to cut off and crush an isolated part of the Grand Fleet was about the best Germany's overmatched Navy could really hope for, and prompt retreat in the face of that entire force seems strategically sound.
So while I wouldn't rate Jutland as more that strategically average I'm not sure how it's an outright failure.

octavian30 wrote:

Churchill was more of a "oops i did it again" fumbler.

Churchill gets a bad rap. Considering he was in charge of one of the winners in WW2 this seems harsh. Much of goes back to WW1 and Gallipoli. A valid strategic idea spoilt by the incompetent British generals on the spot.
AS an Aussie ANZAC is close to the chest but Churchill was not to blame. The idiots commanding the invasion were. I am not saying it would have done what Churchill hoped but it had promise of knocking Turkey out of the war quickly. Huge gain for little loss. The casualties at Gallipoli were pretty tame compared to say the Somme or Verdun or Paschendale etc.

I'd argue Churchill screwed up the Dardenellis long before any generals were on site.

He assured the war cabinet that the Navy's old pre-dreadnaughts would be able to run the forts and secure Turkish cooperation by putting Istanbul under their guns. Which they utterly failed to do. But that gave Turkey time to overcome its initial panic and reenforce the pennisula heavily, contributing significantly to the later failures of the British and Anzac troops at Gallipoli. But the General's admitted idiocy was far from the first thing screwed up in that campaign, and more than one of the early ones can be laid at Churchill's feet.

Here's my top ten list of.... Tacticians I wouldn't want to fight in ANY space-warfare... in the Honorverse... besides the Admirals Alexander-Harrington and Tourville, those three are WAY too easy. So my total is still ten.

Tactical:
Aivars Terekhov
Shannon Foraker
Jennifer Bellefeuille
Alfredo Yu

...bunch of d--- sneaks, those four...

Top 3 Strategists:
King Roger --> read House of Steel and you realize that BuWeaps and BuShips and even Ghost Rider started improving in the "right" directions because of his impetus

Sonya Hemphill: has managed to dump her "weird enthusiasms" in favor of weapons systems that really work. Keep in mind she takes the "flick the impellers trick" Honor used in the "early in Honor's career" short story "with one stone" and comes up with the idea for the FTL coms on the recon drones, including what is needed to turn it into the pre-eminant part of the Manticoran battle platform.

Herzog Rabenstrange: Granted, we have NO idea from any of the stories what he can do in a space battle, but he's someone you wouldn't want as an adversary and has made every correct politico/military decision for the Andermani empire for YEARS and YEARS. He's why Silesia eventually ceases to be a bone of contention because Manticore trusts him as an ally.